Meet the Disinformation Experts™

After many years of increasingly stupid agit-prop, legacy media and academia begin to talk, however imperfectly and stupidly, about blind spots: grab some popcorn, you're in for a wild ride

Earlier this week, I highlighted one of the core tenets of our increasingly authoritarian times, the persecution of perceived, or anticipated, dissenters.

Exemplified by far-right activist Martin Sellner—who was never convicted of a crime—I tried to highlight two aspects: first, harassment and pre-emptive measures, such as travel bans, the denial of bank accounts (hi, Canadian Freedom Truckers, you’re not alone), and the increasing difficulties of renting an apartment as Mr. Sellner’s view are apparently so unpalatable to banks and property-owners that they don’t want to do business with him. Of course, in a free-market system, one cannot be forced to do so, yet this kind of pre-emptive, or anticipatory obedience (vorauseilender Gehorsam) is both very common among German-speakers as well as highly problematic.

The other main point I wanted to highlight is the far left-ish bias of most ‘experts™’ on matters, such as ‘far right-wing populism’ and the like. The worn adage that ‘legacy media has a left-wing bias’ is largely correct:

The Dirty Business of Manufacturing Media Reporting

The very same issue is found virtually all over ‘ze experts™’ pushed and hyped by said legacy media; if, after the Covid ‘Pandemic™’, you still need a reminder, let’s just mention that legacy media permitted only the voices of die-hard pro-vaxx, pro-mandate, and pro-gov’t ‘experts™ to be heard while censoring and admonishing everyone who publicly disagreed with these messages.

Taboo, or: The Persecution of Dissenters

I originally penned that piece about a year ago, and, much like in the case of Stupid Watergate, legacy media is beginning to catch on to the political biases, which is the subject of today’s posting. I’ll merely add that I have serious doubts as to there being any consequences, such as a revisitation of these very same ‘experts™’ and their opinions or even asking questions, such as how might the political leaning of such an ‘expert™’ influence his or her consideration of any given issue.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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‘Experts on Misinformation are Clearly on the Left’

By Edda Grabar and Holger Kreitling, Die Welt, 21 Jan. 2025 [source; archived]

There is a lot of excitement about disinformation and fake news on social media. The danger is high. Communication scholar Christian Hoffmann [faculty profile at the U of Leipzig] has a sober view of the issues—and knows the true [sic] data situation.

Welt am Sonntag [‘WAMS’ in the following]: Meta boss Marc Zuckerberg wants to return Facebook to ‘free speech’ in the USA. Quite a few see democracy in danger from social media and tech oligarchs. Is the apocalypticism [sic] justified?

Christian Hoffmann: No, I don’t think so [showing himself to be a true academic sycophant]. Social media and technological innovations certainly have a disruptive character and pose new challenges for our political institutions. But I assume that they [meant are ‘our political institutions’] are stable and at the same time flexible enough to adapt [if not, they’ll go the same way as the dinosaurs].

WAMS: What challenges are we facing?

Hoffmann: We are witnessing a decentralisation of information [translation: ‘message control’ via legacy media is getting harder and harder, please pity the powers-that-be for a moment], away from a few influential media organisations towards a large number of players, some of whom are journalists or ‘quasi-journalists’ [much like ‘ze experts™’, Prof. Hoffmann is disparaging independent voices, and I’d give the world to know whom he considers a ‘quasi-journalist’ and whose ‘the real deal’], but I digress]. In the case of social media, citizens have been given public communication platforms [this is factually correct: citizens were given these options—by the intel community working in cahoots with the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., which ‘ze expert™’ Hoffmann failed to note]. This change has advantages and disadvantages. It brings liveliness to the discourse and can make a democracy more adaptable and flexible.

WAMS: At the moment, we tend to see the disadvantages.

Hoffmann: When many more people can contribute to a discourse, there is naturally also a lot of questionable information among them [which is why Edward Bernayse wrote the classic handbook of wartime messaging turned into ‘PR’, Propaganda, first published in 1928]. And, of course, this leads to fake news and misinformation—but these have not played a major role so far [statements like this make me wonder what would have happened to, say, NATO’s aggression vs. Yugoslavia in 1999 or the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq had social media been around…]

WAMS: How do you come to that conclusion?

Hoffmann: A lot of studies have come to the conclusion that only a few people see fake news, most people get their information predominantly from reputable sources [you mean, CNN or the European state broadcasters?]. Studies from the USA show that the proportion of ‘untrustworthy information’ is less than one per cent of what people consume overall. Even [sic] on social media, the proportion of misinformation is in the single-digit percentage range [huhum, I’d have a follow-up question: why do so many people hold ‘wrong™’ opinions or vote the ‘very wrong™’ way? Needless to say, this isn’t what Die Welt is interested in].

WAMS: According to the JIM Study 2024, 61% of young people say they come into contact with fake news.

Hoffmann: In surveys, people often say that see fake news, but it is unclear what they mean by that. For AfD sympathisers, the ‘Tagesschau’ is fake news [that would be German state broadcaster ARD’s nightly newscast]. International studies show that the most common sources of fake news are politicians and journalists [just remember the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ and throw in the notion of ‘almost 100% effectiveness’ of the modRNA poison/death juices and you’ll know what Prof. Hoffmann should have said]. In this respect, I would be very cautious. Even studies on the 2016 US election, when Donald Trump ran for the first time, were unable to prove that fake news had a significant influence on the voting decision [oh, I so wish there would be a linked reference but, alas, there isn’t—we cannot find out ourselves if that claim is true: isn’t that ironic? Also, perhaps voters didn’t like Hillary Clinton?].

WAMS: For years, a different thesis was put forward—also by social scientists [after Prof. Hoffmann’s quip about politicos™ and journos™, Die Welt now retaliates by noting that ‘ze experts™’ also spread fake news: grab some popcorn, this is the fun part of the interview].

Hoffmann: The narrative that fake news on social media misled people and that they therefore ‘voted the wrong way’ has existed since Brexit and the first Donald Trump election [so, it wouldn’t have anything to do with, say, social media on smart™ phones since 2012? Psychologists like NYU’s Jonathan Haidt would very much disagree with this as the dangers to esp. teenage girls are very well documented]. This is very convenient [for whom?] and quickly catches on because it is associated with scepticism towards new technologies [ah, you’re not merely sceptics, you’re the modern-day equivalent of Luddites—isn’t our good Prof. Hoffmann more eloquent than, say, Hillary Clinton?]. And it feeds the third-person effect: we like to assume that other people are less enlightened, less intelligent and less well informed than we are. Which is rarely the case empirically [I’d like to offer an anecdote: one of my brothers is a (sports) ‘journo™’, he’s super ‘woke’, and very much dislikes my, shall we say, ‘differential’ views on virtually every single issue, hence he doesn’t read my stuff (fine with me), yet he objects to my views on emotional grounds that he declares superior: I suspect most ‘journos™’ to be just like that, which is what I think Prof. Hoffmann is saying here, too, albeit in a way less clear way].

WAMS: There is often talk of mass shooters who became radicalised on social media?

Hoffmann: Causal conclusions are drawn that are too simple. What happens on social media is often a reflection of social realities. If a right-wing extremist communicates, then there will be a lot of right-wing extremist content [because this is how social media’s algorithms work: you click on cat videos, you are suggested more cat videos; by association, Prof. Hoffmann is against cat videos, which is the only association legacy media and ‘ze experts™’ might draw from this]. To draw the conclusion from this that the content has made the person right-wing radical is too short-sighted. Research shows that there are many factors that influence radicalisation. Not everyone who surfs the internet carelessly is at risk of becoming radicalised [you see, freedom is dangerous, and ‘ze expert™’ thinks the rabble shouldn’t be permitted to that playground unattended lest he or she may learn something unpalatable, such as the fact that even (sic, and lol) creatures without a central nervous system like octopuses understand that there are but two sexes].

WAMS: But don’t algorithms favour information that reinforces one’s own opinion? [that’s such BS it boggles the mind—the former merely weaponise what you are looking at, which isn’t necessarily the same as ‘reinforcing one’s opinions’ as humans are, in principle, very much capable of looking at things without immediately and without any reservations acceding to this or that viewpoint they just consumed (otherwise anything and everything like, say, watching a documentation about Hitler might turn people into ‘Nazis™’, isn’t it? Seldom have I read a more stupid ‘argument’]

Hoffmann: Research now [sic, and lol] sees things differently. It says that the filter bubble is a myth, that there is simply no evidence of it in the data [well, at least he’s crystal clear about that]. Of course there are echo chambers. But interestingly, those who inform themselves on the internet have a more varied diet of information than those who use the internet less [huhum, the more you read, the more you know—I’m so glad Prof. Hoffmann is reminding Die Welt about this…]

WAMS: What about the algorithm that controls the selection? [but they don’t quickly stop asking stupid questions that don’t conform to the worldview espoused by the interviewing ‘journos™’]

Hoffmann: There are some studies that say yes, algorithms like to suggest similar content to people. Others show that the ‘rabbit hole’ assumption, according to which people are led to ever more radical content, cannot be proven [this is basically the telenovela way of ‘splainin’ the afore-mentioned ‘no, you’re dead-wrong about your claims’ once more: sigh]. Because the platforms do not allow access to the data, it is very difficult to make statements [and a third time, for good measure]. According to my reading of the data, the evidence for filter bubbles has become worse and worse over the past four to five years [ahem, what about the ‘Covid’ op? I mean, sure, there were no ‘filter bubbles’ because big gov’t conspired with big tech and academia to censor dissenters, which is, of course, a ‘very different thing™’ no-one wishes to talk about here]. However, it is possible that they existed before.

WAMS: You can’t deny that social media have a polarising effect [having been smacked three times, Die Welt now ever so slightly changes the wording to say essentially the same thing as before—pay attention to Prof. Hoffmann’s reply]?

Hoffmann: No, but there is also an explanation for this that refutes the filter bubble. It’s because we see far more dissenting and disturbing things on the internet than we do offline [like, say, TikTok videos from the trenches of Ukraine or the Middle East?]. Instead of the friendly [!] social democratic [!!] neighbour [!!!], we also encounter radical progressive positions and hateful discussions [about, say, knife attacks by illegal immigrants, such as happened in Aschaffenburg the other day where an Afghan killed two people, incl. a 2yo child? Note the not very subtle neighbourhood the good Prof. Hoffmann lives in, by the way]. This leads to a kind of emotional alienation, but one that has little rational basis. Because on a factual level, people don’t really disagree. In the USA, this applies to the debate on abortion as well as the debate on immigrants.

WAMS: Is this reinforced by Marc Zuckerberg’s announcement to abolish fact checks? [ah, some good ol’ oligarch-bashing must be there, too]

Hoffmann: Not much [ouch]. The effects of fact checks are very small, if they exist at all [add: beyond the juste milieu’s very own bubbles and echo chambers]. There are even studies that find no effects at all [I think Prof. Hoffmann has had it with these idiotic questions at this point]. And Meta doesn’t want to simply abolish fact checks, but replace them with a new system, the Community Notes, where other users can correct information.

WAMS: Who will benefit from this?

Hoffmann: Studies show that statements from the right on social media platforms have tended to be suppressed or removed in the past. This is because they tended to violate the existing guidelines [here, a discussion about who wrote said ‘guidelines’ and the like would have been necessary; likewise, a comment about the activists enforcing these terms & conditions would have been a must, esp. once one considers the ‘Twitter Files’ that show massive gov’t and intel community interventions—and while we’re at it, let’s merely note that there will be reasons™ for not going ‘there’]. If these are relaxed, right-wing actors in particular will presumably enjoy more freedom [the way this is formulated is highly disingenuous as it also suggests that ‘right-wing actors’ should not have that kind of ‘more freedom’, isn’t it? Talk about picking winners and losers…]

WAMS: How can this be explained?

Hoffmann: One study, for example, shows surprisingly clearly that experts on the topic of ‘misinformation’ are clearly to the left of centre politically [this is the money paragraph, please pay attention]. That’s not surprising, journalists and social scientists are also left of centre on average [here are your ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’, and they are not really ‘on ze right™’ but—the horror! the horror!—elsewhere]. If we look back to the beginnings of the fake news debate, it can be explained that people on the left were more irritated by the election results after Brexit and the Trump election and were looking for explanations [ouch, this is akin to throwing a gigantic monkey-wrench into the left-wing legacy media-academia machinery, Marx Brothers style]. Right-wing content was therefore scrutinised [imagine a world in which left-wing content is subjected to the same level of scrutiny…which is why, I’d argue, Prof. Hoffmann, realising what he just said, is ever-so-subtly (not) changing the topic]. Now they are being given more space again. Conversely, there is also evidence that Republicans in the USA, for example, spread more misinformation and use more dubious sources than Democrats. However, it is illegal to disseminate illegal information both in the USA and in this country.

WAMS: How do the European and US guidelines differ?

Hoffmann: In principle, not so much. In the US, platforms are allowed to authorise all content that is not illegal. The same essentially applies here [in the EU, Prof. Hoffmann claims before he immediately adds a few additional restrictions that don’t apply in the US]. Here [in the EU], the framework of what is legal is narrower, for example Holocaust denial is prohibited. However, we are increasingly operating in a grey area in Europe, with incentives being set to remove too much content rather than too little. With this state-encouraged overblocking, as it is called, we are moving towards censorship [Brian Roemmele, in his conversation with Jordan Peterson in 2023, opined that more content is removed from the internet than being uploaded or created (listen to their podcast, it’s very interesting)].

WAMS: Is it really censorship? [this is perhaps the single most stupid question of this otherwise rich-in-stupidity interview]

Hoffmann: Not if the companies themselves set rules according to which they delete content. But if the state demands the removal of problematic but legal content, as is currently being negotiated in Canada, Australia and the UK, for example, the question arises: who defines what is problematic content? [it is, of course, followed by an equally, if not exceeding-in-stupidity answer]

WAMS: So Zuckerberg is right?

Hoffmann: From a conservative and right-wing perspective, I think so. Take the US election campaign: among Trump’s most popular adverts were quotes from Kamala Harris where she says trans people in prison and also immigrants need to be operated on at taxpayer expense. Such radical positions were also able to establish themselves on the left because they could hardly be criticised from the right—as platforms have largely prevented this discourse [and here, in a nutshell, can we observe a crucial insight: sunlight is the best disinfectant, and ludicrously stupid ideas, like the one cited here, quickly die; I also don’t think that voters aren’t smart enough to figure out that this particular example (although Ms. Harris has said many more equally, if not more, moronic things) is a good idea of voting against that candidate…]

WAMS: Do you have an example? [why another one?]

Hoffmann: If you look at why Musk bought X, the fact that he has a transgender daughter, with whom he has fallen out, probably plays a pretty big role [and now watch the good Prof. Hoffmann discuss these issues in the most stupid way possible]. In the USA a few years ago, the newspaper USA Today named a trans woman, i.e., a biological man, as Woman of the Year. This was poked fun at by the satirical website Babylon Bee, which Musk holds in high esteem and which was promptly blocked on Twitter. Musk then said: ‘I’ll just have to buy the platform.’ Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the discourse on gender issues in the USA has changed massively. This is an example of how the scope for communication is opening up for the political right. [how do you discuss social media censorship citing Twitter as your example without mentioning the ‘Twitter Files’?]

WAMS: Fact-checking was also economically driven because advertisers didn’t want an environment with false reports [while I’m unsure Die Welt understood what just happened, they quickly change the subject once more lest Prof. Hoffmann may or may not mention the ‘Twitter Files’].

Hoffmann: ‘Brand safety’ is an important corrective for digital platforms. In 2021, the Meta Group decided to show less political content and changed the algorithm accordingly. This content is often controversial and hateful. Zuckerberg is now cancelling this decision. This cannot be explained in business terms [nope, but by the absence of a backbone and the potential losses in terms of less traffic on Facebook et al., which is an economic consideration]. There is massive pressure from the new presidency and, of course, from Elon Musk [as if the Biden admin—once more, see the ‘Twitter Files’ as pars pro toto for their shenanigans—didn’t do the same: shall we guess where Prof. Hoffmann with all his ‘nice social democratic neighbours’ might stand politically?], to allow topics that were previously rather prohibited [by whom? Ah, let’s not go there, eh…what a loser]. This gives right-wing and conservative players more communicative room for manoeuvre. If these changes are made in the same way in Europe, this could also have a political impact here [which is why I call academics sycophants: Prof. Hoffmann is effectively cheering on the EU Commission’s censorship drive].

WAMS: Australia has just restricted access to social media for young people. How do you see that?

Hoffmann: I would be cautious. Overall, you can’t say that the use of social media is unhealthy for young people [Prof. Hoffmann clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about—and perhaps he also hates adolescents]. There are negative effects that are very specific. For example, girls who use Instagram a lot tend to have a more negative self-image [also, their suicidal ideation is off the charts since—2012, which is when social media apps became available on ‘smart™’ phones, on which see below]. Conversely, studies show that homosexual young people are better off when they use social media [sure thing; do groomer bubbles exist?] There is not yet sufficient evidence in favour of an age restriction.

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Bottom Lines

Another painful load of ‘expert™’ bullcrap, proudly presented by legacy media falling on their faces repeatedly, if consistently.

First up, how do you talk about censorship in these times without noting the massive gov’t plus big tech interference with the Covid scam, to say nothing about the absence of the ‘Twitter Files’ from this conversation.

Second, ‘if the companies themselves set rules according to which they delete content’, that would be technically fine, if said ‘rules’ or the terms & conditions they use to do so would be enforced like a contract, i.e., they can’t be unilaterally be amended without the consent of the other party. I suppose that won’t happen anytime soon as Big Tech would be sued out of existence before Monday morning.

Next up, what is wrong here isn’t that Prof. Hoffmann mentions a few true things here and there, such as the dominance of left-wing (activists) among ‘ze experts™’ on right-wing politics. It’s no wonder that Die Welt, of all papers, won’t engage with that issue. Curiously, Prof. Hoffmann also notes the massive left-wing bias of most social scientists—but leaves out comparable issues virtually across the humanities and, increasingly so, also in the STEM subjects. I suspect that it is not required to mention that pedagogical schools and faculties of ‘education™’ are hot-beds of far left-wing activism, which is also why Mr. Trump’s executive order to get rid of ‘DEI’ offices won’t work too well: for over a decade, these pedagogical schools and faculties of ‘education™’ have churned out far left-wing teaching staff running most kindergartens, primary, and secondary education institutions. It’ll take a lot of work to return something resembling a balance and reality-based teaching.

Finally, the data on the harms of social media exposure to esp. teenage girls is very well documented, with US-based scholars raising the alarm for almost a decade, yet for whatever reason, a ‘communication & media studies’ professor—how is that even a credible field?—with no documented expertise in these matters is pronouncing it not to be a problem. I do wonder what Prof. Hoffmann’s expert opinion™ might be on the modRNA poison/death juices, or parenthood, for that matter.

Be that as it may, I highly recommend Prof. Jonathan Haidt’s talk at UPenn from well before Covid; it’s a good investment, time-wise:

Finally, isn’t it awe-inspiring to observe legacy media pretending to catch on to issues, such as far left-wing biases among (self-proclaimed) ‘experts™’ of far right-wing politics?

The same is also very much true of today’s Big Brother-esque version of ‘the Party line’, otherwise known as Wikipedia.

In the top-linked piece about the rising tide of taboos in the West, I mentioned this and I’m reproducing two paragraphs here as an illustration:

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Expert authors on right-wing extremism Julian Bruns and Natascha Strobl, leading member of the ‘Offensive gegen Rechts’ [Offensive vs. The Right], consider Sellner's origins in the National Resistance milieu to be an exemplary rooting of the ‘Identitarians’ in neo-Nazism [two individuals, Mr. Bruns and Ms. Strobl, whose named group is a left-wing affiliate of, among others, the Communist Party and Antifa; Ms. Strobl is also said to be ‘in the inner circle’ of the current left-wing (pseudo) Marxian head of the Social-Democratic Party, Andreas Babler]. In 2009, [Sellner] attended the ceremony of honour at the grave of the Wehrmacht fighter pilot Walter Nowotny [about this one, see below], which is considered a meeting place for ‘like-minded people’ (Hans-Henning Scharsach [who, too, is of the same ideological mindset as the two other ‘experts’) of neo-Nazis. In this context, the journalist and publicist Nina Horaczek described him as a ‘right-wing extremist’ [here, too, we note that Ms. Horaczek is a Communist activist, too, and she appeared at-length in a recent exposé of mine on the unholy matrimony of the Roman Church and Communism]. According to the political scientist Hajo Funke, Sellner belonged ‘to the circle’ of the neo-Nazi website Alpen-Donau.info, which was active from 2009 to 2011 and centred around the Holocaust denier Gottfried Küssel, in whose circles he moved [Professor Funke is the only academic here, and while he did research right-wing extremism, we note Prof. Funke’s affiliation with the ‘New Left’ and his many ties to the Socialist Bureau (orig. Sozialistisches Büro), whose aim was to ‘unify the socialist forces in both the Federal Republic and the GDR’]. Sellner confirmed that he had previously belonged to Küssel's close circle. He had been in an ‘exuberant adolescent phase’ at the time [look, he did stupid shit as a teen]. After Alpen-Donau.info was shut down, he ‘found his new political home with his followers in the “Identitarians”’, according to Funke.

To recap: the four people who ‘consider’ and ‘describe’ Martin Sellner here are all situated more or less far to the left-of-centre, incl. ties to Antifa-affiliated groups (Bruns, Strobl), open Communists (Horaczek), or membership in the Cold War-era, pan-German Socialist Bureau (Funke). I thought you should know this.

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This is where we stand—it’s not just that legacy media has a thorough, left to far-left bias in general, they also have a massive pro-US/Transatlantic bias, as shown by several ‘connections’, or conflicts of interest:

Media in Germany

In the final analysis, there’s no escaping, no less possibility of getting away with these kinds of distorted, biased, and increasingly surreal discursive constructions.

Most BS put out by legacy media—as well as by ‘politicos™’ and many ‘experts™’—resembles the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.

Thus the importance of being able to navigate both this largely fake world inhabited by ‘politicos™’, ‘journos™’, and ‘experts™’ AND the real world.

Yes, this requires much more effort than merely going along; but there’s no substitute for reality, as there are real-world consequences for refusing to accept reality.

Buyer beware.